Back in my day, when dinosaurs didn’t have feathers, the idea of putting together a resume sounded as fun as getting my front teeth pulled out. I’ve never had my adult front teeth pulled out, but I like how it illustrates how much I hated resumes. With a resume, you must make it, which usually involves hours of tweaking and starting over. With your front teeth, you either must do it yourself or you go to a dentist, sit in the chair…they pull, you bleed, and then you leave. Cool, now we have a resume and missing front teeth! Guess what? Now we must modify our resume every time we want a new job and we must either deal with our missing front teeth or get fake ones put in. Never mind. I tried to make a connection and failed.

Failing is okay! I’m not sad I wrote that paragraph above, even though it failed to capture how I felt about resumes. Sometimes we must fail to get better. I could change what I wrote above, but I’m not going to. It’s going to stay right where it is. Someday I could change it, but today is not that day. You will not build your best resume the first time you create it. Actually, it’s going to be filled with basic information about you! It should contain your name, address, contact info, a short summary about you, skills you have, jobs you’ve had, and your education. Look at that last sentence. It looks simple, right? It is simple!

What makes a resume?

The reason resumes get a bad rep is because of the format, and that whole thing I’ve always heard, which is; It must stand out among a pile of others. Stand out? Oh! So that means make it have glitter, emboss your name, and when the person grabs it, it plays music. Nope! Don’t do any of that. I think the idea of a perfect resume is just a simple, concise, piece of paper or papers (no more than three) that describes you and what you can do. Think of it like a professional description of you. Professional? Well, that is what you want to become, a pro, right? Make sure you spell your words correctly. Fix any red or green squiggles, and don’t use clip art. Done!

Well, no, we’re not done. We’ve only just begun! Let’s rundown the components of any decent resume:

• Header
  • A header usually contains your name, address and contact information.
  • I’ve seen people put their picture here…would not advise.
  • You can put your social network information here but try to keep your personal life and professional life separate. Do you really want your “would be” boss knowing that thing you did last summer?
• Mission Statement
  • A single paragraph.
  • Something that can be comfortably explained in a ride up an elevator.
  • Who you are and what you are looking for.
• Languages and technologies
  • An organized list of technical things you know in order of knowledge and experience with them.
  • Don’t list irrelevant languages and technologies. Most people will not care that you can program on a TI Calculator. I mean, I totally can, but do you care? See, you probably don’t care…I don’t.
• Skills
  • Hard and soft skills.
  • Multiple spoken languages? Cool! List them!
• Job History
  • Company name.
  • Dates you worked there.
  • Title at the company.
  • Highlights of projects you worked on.
  • Order from most recent to oldest.
  • Don’t feel like you have to go all the way back to when you mowed your grandparent’s lawn, unless that really was your only previous job.
• Education
  • Post Grad.
  • Under Grad.
  • High School.
  • Certifications.
  • GPA’s, honors, etc. are not a requirement.

What makes a good resume?

I’ve seen hundreds of resumes and I believe I can spot a good one vs a bad one. My first resumes were bad. Sometimes they managed to get me in the door, and sometimes they didn’t. I’m going to give you my perspective on what I believe makes a good resume, at least from an interviewer’s perspective.

When I receive a resume, I never assume that the hiring manager correctly identified the correct candidate. I first look at the job description and the role being filled. From there, I look at the resume and I try to understand its layout. I’ve seen a lot of different layouts, but the ones that are easy to follow logically really catch my eye and they give me insight into the mind of the individual. First off, who is this person. I always like to know their name. Second, what do they know language wise? If I see every technology under the sun, I question how well they know each thing and if they have a focus. Next, I check their work history, looking for jobs and projects that pop out. Finally, I look at their education.

I mentioned earlier that a resume is simply a description of you professionally, but I want to let you in on a little secret. Your resume is a key into you. I like to see if I can find who you are digitally. A quick search using your name and job history will probably pull up your linkedin account and potentially other digital thumbprint information about you. But just because you have a picture on your twitter that shows you duct-taped to a door does not mean you will instantly be rejected. If there are things you don’t want to be visibly linked to your name, ensure that you consider privatizing this public information.

Don’t lie on your resume…please! Lies might get you an interview, but they can be discovered as lies from a good interviewer. Don’t try to make yourself something you’re not, it will just hurt you. Be open in honest about yourself. A lie will do way more damage to your professional image than admitting you don’t know something. You are not expected to know everything…no one does.

Good resumes are tailored to the job you are after. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you want to put in a resume for a company that creates online stores. Think about what that company might consider important. Maybe your skillset includes creating video games as a hobby. At first, this might not seem like something they would care about, but you can spin it. Video games deal with Human Interaction. Websites deal with human interaction. Take that and use it to explain your knowledge of what works for users what doesn’t. Spin spin spin. You can and should take your work history and try to fit it if you can.

A quick note about your skill list. Interviewers really don’t care about versions of systems you know. They care about what things you know, but they also care about how well you know these things. If you are a java developer, put it in your mission statement. If you know python a bit, cool, add it under your java skill. If you know what F# is, but you’ve never really used it professionally, don’t list it. Also, knowledge of things like photoshop could be a plus, but if they don’t apply, don’t list them.

Submitting Résumés

So, you have a resume that looks pretty good, awesome! Is it short, simple, tailored and honest? Great! You are ready to send it out to the world. So how do you do that? You can go into the company and deliver them personally, but this is kind of old fashioned. Instead look at the company’s website for job openings and submit it the way they would like to receive them. I call this direct delivery. You can always put your resume online. Created a linkedin profile and put it there. I just want to warn you that you will probably get a lot of recruiters messaging you about it. This can be a good or a bad thing. It’s great if you need a job ASAP, but it is terrible when you have a job you like but keep getting asked if you want a new job from recruiters.

There are also recruiters. Recruiters are people whose sole job is to get you a job. They make money on getting you hired. They can submit your resume on your behalf. Some are good and some are bad. If you go this route, make sure that they help you edit your resume where it makes sense. Make sure you are not paying them though, you should never have to pay to get an interview, that just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Perfection?

Your resume does not need to be perfect. Just use a simple structure that is clean. You can use any word processor and you can just pick an online template. You really don’t have to be creative here, just keep it professional and readable. Don’t worry about the details and over analyzing it. Keep it under 3 pages, 2 is way better though. Don’t include any pictures, they don’t add anything. Also, you can do this yourself, you do not need to hire a professional Get someone to review it! Make sure you have them check for spelling and sentence structure. Keep an eye on the red and green squiggles. You do not want to misspell the word Technical, among others!

Final Thoughts

Don’t fear the reaper resume. It really isn’t as big of a deal as people make it out to be. It is a formatted description of you. If you’re a gamer, consider it like your character sheet, but instead of playing a game, you’re playing life. Speaking of the game of life, has anyone ever actually played that game? I remember when I was a kid, I would look at that game and want to play it because the board looked so cool. I’ve always wondered if I somehow missed out on something amazing or if I dodged a bullet. The world…may never know.

Before I wrap this up, I wanted to show you my resume. I’ve decided to redact it after thinking about what more nefarious types of people might do with it. Even with the redactions though, this is my real resume.

Resume-Redacted